The Yongle Encyclopedia is a large-scale encyclopedia–the largest in pre-modern China--arranged by subject categories traditionally used in China. The entire work is comprised of 22,877 juan (sections) of text proper and a prolegomenon and index in 60 juan, all bound in 11,095 volumes, amounting to about 370 million characters in all. The encyclopedia preserved textual information from about 8,000 texts of all kinds, from pre-Qin times to the early Ming dynasty, covering the works of famous specialists in such areas as astronomy, geography, human affairs, famous ...